Clearly, in this case, the imitation is conscious and not merely accidental. And, unsurprisingly, this well proven formula executed well by Robert DeLong has worked well to produce a hit. It probably doesn't quite cross the line into being a copyright or trademark violation, but it coasts close to that line.

The same notion, that randomness can be an unjustified assumption was key to the solution of the German ENIGMA code in World War II, as portrayed in the movie "The Imitation Game", where the key to breaking the code turned out to be the insight that the encoded messages were much less random than the protocol used to solve them had assumed.